Doomed heroes of Flight 93

Innocent airline passengers caught in a terrorist nightmare filled their last moments with desperate acts of courage. ANDREW LAXON and agencies report on the drama.

It was just before 9 am, and the scene on board United Airlines flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco was on the brink of hysteria.

One man had locked himself in the toilet, begging police to believe him as he told them on his cellphone that the plane had been hijacked.

Another, Jeremy Glick, was on the phone to his wife, Liz, telling her three Arab men were on board with knives and "a large red box that they claimed contained a bomb".

Then something extraordinary happened. Glick and a handful of fellow passengers realised they were beyond salvation, but decided they were going to act to ensure as few others as possible would share their fate.

He told his wife that he and his comrades had taken a vote and thought they had nothing to lose by "rushing" the hijackers.

Another passenger, Thomas Burnett, of San Ramon, California, told his wife the same thing in a series of cellphone conversations patched through to the FBI.

"I told him in the second call about the World Trade Center and he was very curious about that and started asking questions," said Deena Burnett.

By the third phone call, "I could tell that he was formulating a plan and trying to figure out what to do next. You could tell that he was gathering information and trying to put the puzzle together."

In his last call, Burnett said he and two other passengers had decided to make a move.

"I told him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself and he said no. He said no," said his wife, shaking her head with a half-smile.

CNN reported that in conversations on board the plane, heard by air controllers as the plane approached Cleveland, someone shouted, "Get out of here".

There were sounds of a scuffle and a voice again yelling, "Get out of here".

The a voice said in broken English: 'There is a bomb on board. This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport."

The microphone then went dead. Soon afterwards, after what the New York Daily News called "some unusual flying manoeuvres", Flight 93 plunged into an old coal field southeast of Pittsburgh. All 45 people aboard were killed.

There has been speculation that the hijackers were heading for the presidential retreat at Camp David, 135km away.

Earlier, quick-thinking American Airlines pilot John Ogonowski enabled air traffic controllers to listen in as Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was hijacked and flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Air traffic controllers in the Boston area heard a hijacker give instructions to the pilot in English.

"He was saying something like, 'Don't do anything foolish. You're not going to get hurt'," a controller said.

Someone - either the pilot or the hijacker - then made a request for a flight path to JFK Airport in New York.

The plane made an abrupt turn at 29,000ft above Albany, in upstate New York. One last statement before communication was lost was not fully understood at the time but soon became chillingly clear: "We have more planes, we have other planes."

Meanwhile, the scene in the passenger area was turning to mayhem.

On AA Flight 11 and possibly on the other plane out of Boston, United Airlines Flight 175, hijackers pulled weapons out of carry-on luggage and began stabbing the cabin crew.

"They started killing stewardesses in the back of the plane as a diversion. The pilot came back to help and that is how they got into the cockpit," one source told the Boston Herald.

"People were calling from the plane saying they were getting killed."

A flight attendant on Flight 11 called her airline's flight operations centre in Dallas on an airlink line and reported that passengers were being stabbed.

On Flight 175 a flight attendant rang through with the seat number of one of the hijackers, giving the FBI one of its first precious leads.

Some of the horror of what happened on the four hijacked aircraft came to light yesterday as investigators took their first look at passenger lists, air traffic control transcripts and the testimony of passengers talking on cellphones.

The clearest lesson to emerge was that, for all the meticulous planning that went into the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the core concept was devastating in its simplicity.

The men who hijacked the four airliners did not have any fancy weaponry. They did not need to build any kind of explosive device or smuggle high-tech equipment across international borders and through airport security systems.

Instead, their only weapons were a few innocuous-looking knives - cardboard cutters which could have been assembled on board from razor blades and plastic holders - and their own fanaticism.

The "bombs" they used to bring death to thousands of people were the planes themselves, all four loaded with nearly 100,000 litres of jet fuel at the start of what were supposed to be routine flights across America.

Hints of how the terrorists planned the attack have begun to emerge.

The FBI suspects two men, identified as Mohammed Atta and Marwan, trained from July last year to January at a flying school in Venice, Florida, which teaches pilots to fly small planes such as Cessnas.

One group of five hijackers apparently entered the United States through Canada, even though two of them were on a border watch list because of their connections with an Islamic Jihad terrorist group.

They flew from Maine to Boston, where they stayed in a hotel room.

They then rented a car and drove to Boston's Logan Airport - where investigators later found a flight manual in Arabic - and boarded one or both of the Los Angeles-bound planes which were flown into the World Trade Center.

The two men who rented the car have been identified as Ahmad Ibrahim Ali al-Hazoumi, aged 22, and Wael Mohammad al-Shehri, aged 29, from Saudi Arabia.

For all the hijackers, getting through airport security may have been easier than anyone would suspect. Federal Aviation Authority officials say knives with blades less than 2in (5cm) long are permitted as long as they do not seem to have a hostile intent.

It probably did not help that the security checkers were minimum-wage workers with little incentive or training.

In each case, the hijackers waited until the plane had completed its take-off and was approaching cruising altitude.

They then pulled out their knives, announced they were taking over the plane and herded passengers as far away from the cockpit as possible.

On at least two planes, they stabbed and killed flight attendants to create a diversion and get the pilot out of the cockpit.

Most commentators believe they also killed the pilots so they would be left unchallenged at the controls.

One unidentified commercial jet pilot told Newsweek magazine that the hijackers had probably practised on advanced flight simulators, which are available for hire by the hour.

A simulator for New York's John F. Kennedy Airport would include landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center.

"One of the reasons I'm so convinced a simulator played a role in the selection and accuracy of the attack was that I've done it myself," said the New York-based pilot.

"Sometimes, when we've had a few minutes to spare at the end of our own simulator sessions, we've dived at and flown through those twin towers. I guess none of us will do it again."

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